Your emotional companion is being turned off forever

As predicted here 4 years ago, giving a VC-funded cloud-based animated robot as an emotional companion to your child is a risky move.

With VC funding drying out, the startup behind this “amazing” concept has to turn off the cloud computers needed to keep these teddy bears “alive”.

Since Embodied marketed Moxie as a companion and development toy for children, there’s concern about kids potentially suffering an emotional toll after the robot abruptly becomes inoperable.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/12/startup-will-brick-800-emotional-support-robot-for-kids-without-refunds

I will not post here the viral video of a father announcing the news to his crying child. Why would you even film something like that?

In one video, for example, a man appears to beat up a woman, strangle her with a string and attempt to suffocate her with a plastic bag. In another, a person does the same things to the robot dinosaur. Affectionate treatment of the robot and the human led to similar patterns of neural activity in regions in the brain’s limbic system, where emotions are processed, fMRI scans showed.

Humans show empathy for robots | Fox New